


Ghosts Moving Through the Storm

by dogmatix, norcumi



Series: Teeny Tiny Mandalorian Kenobis [6]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Clones, GFY, M/M, Tiny Cloned Jedi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-02
Updated: 2015-05-02
Packaged: 2018-03-26 18:23:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3859990
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dogmatix/pseuds/dogmatix, https://archiveofourown.org/users/norcumi/pseuds/norcumi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rex's kids have made it clear -- they want him to go to Tatooine. He has no idea why they want him to go unarmed to a small house in the middle of nowhere, but he trusts them, the same way he used to trust Obi-Wan.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ghosts Moving Through the Storm

**Author's Note:**

> This is an alternative possibility to [Light and Sand](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3858241). Morgyn Leri did an incredible job with the meeting between Obi-Wan and the TTMK, but this story kept poking at Norcumi until she wrote it. Consider this a way things might have gone between Obi-Wan and Rex.

Atin and Whisper are up to something. That isn’t news, not really, but this is pretty extreme. Even tracking down Cody and keeping the man from an absolute breakdown hadn’t involved this much shenanigans.

“Have you ever been to Tatooine?”

Not the smoothest line, even for a youngling who is learning how to segue from Cody. Atin has _coordinates_. Whatever it is, all of them want him there, they want Cody to stay with them in orbit, and they want Rex there _now._

“There” is the shoddiest hut in the middle of the most Force-forsaken desert he’s ever been unfortunate enough to be in, and Rex fought on Geonosis. He approaches it slowly, wondering what’s there, what’s so important. The kids hadn’t told him anything other than he had to go there. He wouldn’t need his blaster.

He’s still not sure how reassuring that is.

Still. He trusts his kids.

The wind is picking up as he brings the speeder to a halt near the door. It’s ajar to the evening air, the breeze that is rapidly cooling even as it kicks up more and more sand. There’s a hell of a storm coming.

Rex has learned to trust in the Force – as crazy as that sometimes is – and Whisper’s soft orders – even if it’s as odd as “keep moving.” So he just walks up to the door, not quite expecting the place to be inhabited.

He stops at the threshold, his first instinct to go for a blaster he’s not wearing. There’s a being at home, back towards him as they stand before a cooking area. Their hands are gripping the counter, the head bowed so he can’t make out in the dying light who or what they are.

Rex recognizes him anyways. All words are lost, his breath caught even as the wind starts to rise to a howl behind him. The tan tunics covering a precise curve of spine. The shoulders are bowed now, as they so rarely were. The hands with a white-knuckled grip show scars of a brutal sort, old burns maybe, that have cleared up with time and what was probably some vague attempt at healing. The clothes and the body they hide are threadbare, lean verging onto something unhealthily thin. If not for the slow rise and fall of hunched shoulders, Rex would think this was some kind of vision, rather than an impossibility.

“…Obi-Wan?” he finally breathes, shock punching through enough to dare speak, to possibly send this vision back to his imagination.

Instead, the man hunches a little more, giving the faint impression of a head canting to the side. Not enough to look at Rex, not enough to be seen, but enough to acknowledge his presence. Rex takes a faltering step forward, hand upraised because he has no weapons, nothing else to fight with, and if you don’t fight ghosts then what _do_ you do with them?

The ghost just shakes his head, from the vague movement. There’s a soft huff of sound, and Rex can’t figure what it is, even as he takes another step. His hand is still outstretched, for all that he knows he will not, _cannot_ touch a ghost.

He wants, he desperately wishes, but he _knows_ Obi-Wan Kenobi is dead.

“You should be dead,” that painfully familiar voice declares, cracked with something. Maybe emotion, maybe hard living, maybe old screams. Doesn’t matter. It’s still Obi-Wan.

“ _You_ should be dead,” Rex manages to whisper. “The only thing leaving Mustafar was Palpatine’s ship.” At the planet’s name, Obi-Wan twitches, glaring over his shoulder for an instant, just long enough for Rex to see rage and pain and who the fuck knows what else.

He is, in the end, a soldier. He lunges, grabbing those threadbare tunics and hauling the ghost around. By the time he’s shifted his hold and grabbed the front, a lightsaber blade has sprouted up between them. The blue-white glow makes those old, pained eyes seem fever mad, for all that they’re filled with tears.

“Why are you here?” Obi-Wan growls, teeth bared and expression almost feral.

“I…was told to.” All the remaining heat is draining out of him, the desert leeching its cold into him. He was told. Atin and Whisper told him.

“Who?” Obi-Wan’s voice is harsh and cold, echoing the howling winds outside. Rex wonders for a panicked moment if Obi-Wan just read his mind, but the Jedi don’t – they didn’t –

They are dead.

A moment later, the ghost confirms it didn’t worm that secret from him by glancing aside, glaring at an empty part of the room. “Did you tell him?” Then it glares back with a little shake of the head, as if it doesn’t matter. “I thought you were dead.” This time, the emotion cracking the voice is clearer, and for that, all the worse.

Rex lets go of the tunics, stumbling back as if his hands are burnt, because ghost or not, mad or not –

The man in the room with the lightsaber isn’t the one cloning his maybe-dead lover.

They stare each other down, the shimmering weapon the only illumination as ancient sensors in the threshold finally realize there’s a dust storm going on, and shuts the door. Rex finally gives a sharp shake of the head. “When the order came, I went looking for you. General Skywalker. Either. If I found one of you, the other would show up, or I’d know –” That old lump in his throat catches, builds.

Breaks. “I saw the Temple, Obi-Wan. I saw – ” Younglings, dead younglings, so many of them, so many small Jedi, younger even than the shiniest clone sent out to die for the Republic, and that was so Jedi _didn’t_ die.

Obi-Wan’s face twists, a heart-breaking rictus under a beard he’s let get scraggly. “Anakin’s work, actually.”

Rex shakes his head. “I saw the security tapes. That wasn’t Anakin.”

“You think I wouldn’t know him?” It’s incredulous, almost a scream, and Obi-Wan takes a step forward. “You know which of your brothers you’re looking at, do not tell me I’ve no idea who I am –” His voice breaks off sharply, and his whole body slumps like he just cannot keep himself upright anymore, and only a single string keeps him from going over.

“…What happened on Mustafar?”

Fuck, that brings the fevered fury back to Jedi’s face. He glares up at Rex, adjusting his grip on the lightsaber. “He was mad. Dark. Fallen. You saw the security tapes.”

The silence is telling, the words unspoken beating down on Rex’s shoulders as he stares. Shakes. _No,_ his mind chants, steady and certain with shock that presses harder and harder against his mind.

One of his Generals killed the other.

_No no no no no._ It’s as mad as clones turning on Jedi, just as wrong and even more broken. Clones were _made_ for the Jedi.

Skywalker and Kenobi – Maybe the Force would say they’re made for each other, maybe natural-borns aren’t like that, doesn’t matter.

One means the other.

He’d wonder how many abominations happened that day, except he’s pretty sure there’s no end to it.

“Why are you _here_?” Rex somehow manages to ask, turning the question back around because gods, Obi-Wan Kenobi might be one of the wiliest Jedi to fight in the war, but he doesn’t _run_.

It doesn’t get more remote than here.

The mad light is back in Obi-Wan’s eyes as he glares. “What do you want from me?” he snarls, arms spread wide. “Our brothers destroyed the Jedi Order, and how many did _you_ have to kill to survive? To get _here_? Hasn’t the universe demanded enough of me?”

Something bitter that’s been building inside from the moment he’s stepped inside ignites in Rex, and he sneers right back. “You made a promise to me.” Kenobi’s glare sharpens, but Rex is beyond caring. It had been almost one blow too much, coming off a swamp planet to find his messages overflowing, as always, but several of them were death notices for Obi-Wan, some of them retractions of the same.

Far too many had been messages from Cody asking if he was back yet, because he needed someone to drink with.

There’d been one tiny package, unmarked with no note, no identification. Just the contents: a lock of dark auburn hair, twined together and secured with colored bands Obi-Wan had once explained the meanings of.

From its place in the pile of ‘plast, it had arrived concurrently with the death notices.

It had been a message, but he hadn’t been there to receive it.

They’d had a hell of a fight over the Rako shit. He’d kept the hair, a reminder, a token he almost hadn’t dared to hold on to, but the promise Obi-Wan had given him at the same time, after the argument–

They’d come to mean the same thing.

“You swore you’d come back to me if you could.” He glares around the hut, then turns it back on the Jedi. “Yet here we are. How many oaths have you broken, Master Kenobi?”

“ _All of them!_ ” Obi-Wan roars, arms thrown wide defiantly, daring him to take a shot at him. He jabs a finger at the empty air again, snarling. “I promised _him_ I’d train Anakin, and look how that went! I promised the Order I’d be a good Jedi, a leader, a member of the _Council_ , and I’m sorry, how many times did we fuck in my office? How much _attachment_ do you think I’ve ignored? Can you even count how many times _we_ violated the Jedi Code?” He lowers his arms slowly, hands shaking. “And you.” His voice shakes almost as much. “What the hell are you doing with six of me?”

…He is a Jedi. Of _course_ he knows.

Rex lifts his chin, anger still keeping him defiant instead of despairing. “What do you think?”

Something terrible crosses Obi-Wan’s face, and he steps forward in the slow, predatory glide Jedi do when dueling. The lightsaber ends up underneath Rex’s chin, a buzzing warmth that still shakes a little. “I think you are the only being in the universe who could do that. I would have thought you were the one being who _wouldn’t_.”

“Because you’re a Jedi?” He holds those slightly mad eyes, glare for glare, because he’s already damned himself countless times over but the children exist and he will not belittle them, their existence, or the fact that he would not surrender them for –

Force help him. Not even for this, not even for a sane, healthy Obi-Wan.

He may be on a desert planet, but Kamino is in his blood, his every cell. He’s drowning, and he’s not sure from what.

“You think you’re the only one?” It’s his voice, though he doesn’t mean to speak. “You’re the only Jedi someone missed, the only being my brothers _had_ to destroy despite the fact that it nearly killed them? Do you have any idea how many of them it _broke_? We’re monsters to the rest of the universe that remembers the Jedi through the propaganda, and we _know_ what we are. We were _made_ for you! Then we had to destroy the very thing that defined us, the single thing we knew we were meant for since our decanting! Of fucking course we want that back! We _are_ clones, we know it won’t be – won’t be them, not the people we loved and lost, but we put those holes in the universe, we put those holes in _ourselves_ , and fucked if we’re not going to do what we can to patch that as best we can!” Rex raises a hand, ignoring the lightsaber ready to take his head off, and he points at a Jedi he can barely see because no matter how much he’s tried over the months, there are always more tears. “And if you _dare_ to tell me that those younglings are some kind of perversion –!”

The lightsaber snaps off with a hiss and Obi-Wan slumps back, once again looking haggard instead of mad. “No.” He sounds so weary, with the exhausted tone Rex knows from so many soldiers who are just…done.

He’s stupidly, selfishly glad there’s no droid blaster fire for Kenobi to walk into. Obi-Wan collapses into a chair, dropping his lightsaber to cover his face with both hands. “No. I have somehow managed to avoid being that much of a hypocrite.” When at long last he inhales, he seems to use that to pull himself upright, looking at Rex with a face that is too old, too pained. It makes the gray washed through the auburn stand out more, less distinguished and more worn out. “I’ve been dreaming of them. Of you.”

Rex closes his eyes and lets out a breath, somehow managing to not make too loud a pained noise. Whisper. It has to be. Intentional, accidental, it doesn’t matter. Precocious little Whisper has been up to shit. “And?”

When he looks, Obi-Wan is staring at him, and now the Jedi is the one who looks haunted. “They’re happy,” he declares, voice baffled and body language confused beyond words.

He moves slowly, not quite sure if he’s doing the right thing. He crouches down near Obi-Wan, wanting to hold him, not daring to get close, and instead he reaches out. Rex isn’t sure why his fingertips tracing Obi-Wan’s beard makes the Jedi shake, look like he’s going to fall apart, but he hasn’t come this far to run away.

“Keep moving,” Whisper said.

So he leans forward, letting his fingers slide higher, and Obi-Wan’s eyes close while the Jedi struggles to maintain some kind of control. When he opens his eyes, and there’s something…sane in them, Rex manages something like a smile. “Would you want to meet them?”

There’s a flicker of a lift around the mouth. “Does that mean you’ll come back?”

He can feel that same, sad flicker around his mouth, and he leans forward, not able to stop himself. Rex is holding him, actually has Obi-Wan in his arms again and he’s crying like he hasn’t in he’s not sure how long. “You weren’t the only one to promise that.”


End file.
